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Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning

You're reading from   Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning Perform data mining and machine learning efficiently using Python and Spark

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781787280748
Length 420 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Frank Kane Frank Kane
Author Profile Icon Frank Kane
Frank Kane
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started FREE CHAPTER 2. Statistics and Probability Refresher, and Python Practice 3. Matplotlib and Advanced Probability Concepts 4. Predictive Models 5. Machine Learning with Python 6. Recommender Systems 7. More Data Mining and Machine Learning Techniques 8. Dealing with Real-World Data 9. Apache Spark - Machine Learning on Big Data 10. Testing and Experimental Design

Measuring entropy

Quite soon we're going to get to one of the cooler parts of machine learning, at least I think so, called decision trees. But before we can talk about that, it's a necessary to understand the concept of entropy in data science.

So entropy, just like it is in physics and thermodynamics, is a measure of a dataset's disorder, of how same or different the dataset is. So imagine we have a dataset of different classifications, for example, animals. Let's say I have a bunch of animals that I have classified by species. Now, if all of the animals in my dataset are an iguana, I have very low entropy because they're all the same. But if every animal in my dataset is a different animal, I have iguanas and pigs and sloths and who knows what else, then I would have a higher entropy because there's more disorder in my dataset. Things are more...

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